Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang

My research focuses on the history of the Chinese film archives—public and private alike—while theorizing the materiality and significance of the archive as a cultural object. I seek to question the ontology of the archive not only as a vessel of preservation but also as a living and evolving cultural organism that constructs the future through the preservation and remediation of the past.

Bio

Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang is a first-year PhD student in the department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Originally from China, she received her BA in Media Studies from Emerson College, and her MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California. Lyuwenyu’s primary research interests center around early cinema, film preservation and archiving, Chinese cinema, and East Asian studies. She has presented at the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference and the 2022 NECS Annual Conference. She also published book reviews in The Moving Image and The Velvet Light Trap. Her other interests include film history, photography, and nitrate film preservation.